Monday, December 26, 2011

Some sort of replacement for my google shared items...

One of the things I miss from google reader is the Shared items from other users. What a wonderful feature to be blown away by the bloated Google+ eco system. I used to discover many new blogs or articles through the shared items of my contacts, and now they are gone. I dont know how this Google+ thing is going to develop - at the time being it feels ...not so user friendly for my taste.

So, I think I managed to recreate my shared items list - through a mix of 3rd party services. It is not the most ellegant solution, it is not the fastest one (meaning you don't get to have all the updates instantly on my feed) - but it works. It seems other people have been experimenting with the same recipe, I don't know if they have blogged about it or if it had become mainstream.

The trick. I used a services called ifttt.com (if this then do that). Its free, its cool, you should try it. Through this service I created a task that is going to do the following.

Whenever I 'star' an item in my google reader list, it will post this item link to my delicious account (where i used to store links - in the old days). Delicious is nice enough to give you an rss feed of your links (it is not updated instantly but it works). All the users that want to have a look on what I consider worth sharing by giving the 'star' to them, all they have to do is just grab my delicious feed and subscribed to it. Add it to their g.reader list.

You can create a special folder in your google reader subscriptions list - called for example 'Shared from others' and there you can have the rss feeds of other people sharing through the same trick.

All you need is in the following list.

1. ifttt.com account

2. a delicious account - if you already use one and you dont want to overload it - just make a new one.

3. Enable the google reader and delicious integration from ifttt.com to your accounts.